Liberty. Equality. Diversity. Those are urban ideals. But our cities don’t always live up to those ideals.
In 2015, the Brookings Institution crunched US Census data and found 24 of the 50 largest American cities got whiter between 2010 and 2014. But whiteness still means wealth, so Seattle is losing livability by the second.
A city puts you next to people unlike you, and that is a social-justice issue, not just a matter of better restaurants. How can you work to create and maintain affordable housing in your own neighborhood? How can you persuade the residents of your street that parking is not more important than transit? We still do not have public restrooms for people with nowhere to go, nowhere even to wash for a job interview. Our public school system is even more woefully segregated than it was just a decade ago. Tell the billionaires their financing of charter schools is unacceptable.
